For the first time in almost 50 years, Alaska has a Democratic US representative - Mary Peltola, a member of a native western Alaskan community. I'm sure we're going to hear a lot of spin about how this happened in the coming weeks, so let's dive into the hard facts today.

Alaska passed a referendum enacting Ranked Choice Voting in 2020, the second state to do so after Maine. Their implementation of it goes like this:
- All registered candidates, regardless of party affiliation or lack thereof, participate in an open primary.
- The top four candidates in the primary advance to the general election.
- If none of the four candidates is over 50% after the initial vote tally in the GE, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and RCV kicks in, distributing their votes to their voters' second choice. If no one has over 50% after the second choice tally, the process repeats once more with just two remaining candidates.

Now, I'm pretty sure that pundits and plebs all over the place are gonna claim Peltola only won because of RCV. Here's why that's bubkis:
- In his almost 50 years in the US House, the late Rep. Don Young got less than 50% of the vote TWICE: the first time he ran for the seat (he lost to Nick Begich who went missing in a plane crash before the election, then won the special election to replace him), and in 1992 when he won with just under 47% in a 4-way race.
- In races with just two candidates, he NEVER got less than 51%. And Republicans have also mostly dominated other statewide elections for decades.

So what caused enough people to switch their votes this time? Maybe it's the fact that Peltola is on a personal mission to bring cordiality back to politics. Maybe it's the Hobbs decision by the Supreme Court that gave womens' personal medical decisions to predominantly male state legislators with a religious agenda. Maybe it's the fact that the former President stole and repeatedly refused to return very sensitive government documents and probably sold some of that info to hostile foreign governments, which got hundreds of people murdered or imprisoned.

Whatever the reason is, it all adds up to the fact that the citizens of the United States are sick of elected officials who use their position to lie, obfuscate and destroy everything that our country was built on for their personal enrichment at the expense, and indeed the very lives, of the other 99% of citizens of the country. This isn't the first bellweather in this election cycle, and it sure won't be the last. We can only hope that this holds up in the face of extreme gerrymandering in favor of such reprobates.